Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Federico Morando <federico.morando AT gmail.com>]

On 09/17/2013 01:34 AM, Kat Walsh wrote:

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ShareAlike:

In the ShareAlike licenses, there is now an express permission for downstream users to comply with all obligations to all upstream licensors with reference to the terms and conditions of the Adapter's License. (This is for ShareAlike only; the BY and BY-NC licenses do not include this section.)

I'd like to summarize the main points of a long discussion within the working group of CC Italy (apologies to Diane and the other members of the legal team if this includes some issues we already discussed):

- we fully share the goal of Section 2(a)(5)(A) as summarized above by Kat;
- however we do not support the wording adopted in the sentence "Every recipient of Adapted Material from You automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Adapted Material subject to the terms and conditions of Your Adapter’s License.":
-- in fact, we think that there are no Licensor's rights in the Adapted Material, apart from rights which are already "mediated" by the Adapter's License;
--- (in this sense, we agree with Parker Higgins' message on this list: the fact that the only conditions to respect are the ones of the Adapter's License should be uncontroversial... but this is the case because this already applies under our interpretation of the 3.0 licenses!);
-- therefore and finally, we suggest to use an alternative wording (replacing "Every recipient ... License."): "However, for the avoidance of doubt, with respect to the Adapted Material, every recipient of Adapted Material from You shall be subject to the terms and conditions of the Adapter’s License (e.g., recipients shall attribute the Licensor in the manner required by the Adapter’s License)."

The "However" is meant to differentiate the situation described in the previous sentence (concerning the Licensor's rights in the Licensed Material) from the situation described in the following sentence, which concerns the Adapted Material alone. Of course, and in any case, as Sarah said on this list, if somebody extracts only the original work from the adaptation (where that is possible), then the terms of the original license apply. And this is indeed clarified by the first sentence in Section 2(a)(5)(A).

Our goal, with the previous statement (the one in bold type), is to clarify that respecting the latest Adapter's License downstream is a sufficient condition to respect the entire chain of licenses, and in particular that you just need to look at the latest attribution requirements downstream. The specific example is just meant to help people (who didn't follow our discussions here) to understand the meaning of an otherwise seemingly tautological sentence.

(I'm going to provide other specific pieces of feedback with separate emails.)

Thanks and best regards,

Federico

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-----------------------------------
Federico MORANDO
Director of Research and Policy &
Research Fellow

NEXA Center for Internet & Society
Politecnico di Torino - DAUIN
Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24
10129 TORINO - ITALY

tel.: +39 011 090 5954
fax: +39 011 090 7216
mob: +39 339 7507974
mail: federico.morando AT polito.it
web: http://nexa.polito.it